Frenl is not for lazy people anymore 😤
by Fabien Herfray"Networking for lazy people" is out and "Meet your community" is in.
A lot of things have happened since I released Frenl.
In the past iteration, listening to the feedback of indie hackers, I redesigned the whole sign up flow and went from a 0% (ahem) to a 10% signup rate. The passive networking approach (as opposed to another professional Tinder) seems to be appealing.
This was great but I was still receiving interrogatory feedback: "Who am I going to be matched with? Who are these people?".
Well I couldn't find a good answer to this question.
I realized that even without any kind of matching logic, what made Kismet (the app that inspired me: https://findkismet.com) great was the fact that it was about the Hacker News community. Matching wasn't so much of an issue because you knew already the kind of people that you would meet. It's this feeling of being at home that worked.
I decided to pivot slightly from a standalone app to a tool that could help connecting already existing communities.
I thought it could also help for SEO and communication.
Here is the result and I would love to hear what you think :)
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Yup, good idea and I've signed up.
A while back I wrote a blog post about an idea for "location based [social] networking". Essentially, the idea comes out of Hack-urdays (Hacker Saturdays) that a friend told me about. He said devs would go and co-work, drink coffee, network, etc. I thought, leveraging technology it would totally be possible to do that within a coffee shop without disturbing other patrons who are not participating. You could essentially see people on the app, who are in the same geographic location, who have turned location/profile sharing on. Through the profile you could find people who can help with a given problem. You could then message through the app and because its location based you could then walk over and meet the person and network or get help as needed.
Hope that helps and thanks for developing,
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Hey Simon, thank you! This is definitely an aspect that I wanted to tackle. Emails are great to spark and interest and kickstart a conversation but being able to meet in real life is I think a game changer. Sales people know that better than anyone hehe.
To be 100% honest, I don't have enough users right now to be able to efficiently match by location. That's why I started with communities. But it will come for sure!
Btw I'm still a bit unsure about what should be the landing page. Do you feel like I should keep it the way it is now ("Frenl: Meet your community"), or should I keep it neutral ("Frenl: Lazy networking")?
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Makes sense. Users, in a lot of apps, are one of those frustrating things where you need a critical mass to make the app work but how do you get up to the critical mass. You have a great idea to start with emails.
Offering just location-based chat and partnering with events, co-working spaces, and business conferences might grow the user base. But then the other challenge is the revenue model and I would suggest you need to have a viable revenue plan before growing the users otherwise you'll end up with support costs and no income.
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Hey Fabien,
Got my first match - but the switchboard sends out the messages in a very garbled style - might want to smarten that up a little bit!
Andrew
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Arf I know. Emails are just a nightmare. I think this issue arises when the email is sent from Gmail. It does some weird html -> text conversion and it looks like that. It's on my task list :)
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I like the idea!
Will definitely sign up when I have time. ;)-
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Thanks Christian! :)
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I think you're on the right track with targeting members of preexisting communities. Exactly addresses the questions you got about what kind of people you're gonna get matched with.
Also narrows down the target audience.Removing the "lazy" tag line is also a good move, since passive != lazy.
The passive part could be communicated more directly though, instead of being the third point in a list somewhere down the page. Since that is what sets it apart from being yet another "professional tinder" I'd say.-
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Very true. Actually it made me realize that maybe the main landing page should be less about communities and more about communicating the value like you said.
Because also I would like to still be able to appeal to users that don't recognize themselves in any of the communities.
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I empathize with your desire to appeal to everyone, I struggle with that too.
It might be worth considering to bravely exclude people. Making clear that something is not for everyone will strengthen the appeal to those it really is for.
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Hi Fabien,
Curious to try this, but just got "An unexpected error occured. Please retry later." when I tried to sign up.
Andrew